


With Your Crooked Heart

by Still_and_Clear



Series: In the Basin [9]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mention of past gore, Romance, Tame references to sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 21:40:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1957026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Still_and_Clear/pseuds/Still_and_Clear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Freddie reflects on her relationship with Frederick</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Your Crooked Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This one is rather longer than the others, as it turns out that Freddie simply wouldn't shut up. 
> 
> Many thanks to anyone who has taken the time to read. I hope you've enjoyed. I'll probably revisit this pair some more.

Freddie closed her laptop lid with a click, deciding to at least attempt to tidy the apartment a _little_ before Frederick arrived. She suspected that he actually found her clutter vaguely comforting and knew for a fact that he liked it when she left her things lying around his pristine, gleaming house – having caught him grinning dopily at the earrings she had left on the bedside table – but the mess really was reaching critical mass.

Not that she didn’t enjoy the reminders of him in her own apartment, she thought, her mouth slanting into a wry smile. The first had been cufflinks, left on the table – she knew – as a test: Frederick’s experimental attempt to ascertain whether she would return them promptly, or let them rest in her house - a tacit validation of their new arrangement. She had left them, and had felt a dopy grin take up residence on her own face when his hopelessly expressive green eyes had lit up at the sight of them in a little glass dish alongside some of her own jewellery. After that, there had been ties and psychological journals and aftershave, and while Freddie lied to many people she tried not to lie to herself – and so admitted honestly that she enjoyed this blurring of the lines between their homes.

Thinking back, she wasn’t quite sure precisely _when_ she had decided that she might be interested in Frederick as something more than a particularly choice interviewee. He had, of course, been on her mind for a while after the incident at the observatory. She had felt a strange compulsion to see him in the hospital that she had quickly put down to her keen instinct for opportunity, telling herself that if ever anyone had positively _owed_ her an interview, it was him. However, she had felt an equally strange sense – for her – of compunction, and hadn’t wanted her presence to remind him of what had happened, especially not as he lay helpless in a hospital bed.

He had asked her, once, as they lay in the dark, with her fingers trailing absently up and down his scar, whether the memories of that night bothered her at all. Freddie, well-versed in parsing for subtext, knew the fact that he used his therapist voice meant the question made him feel vulnerable. She had told him honestly that the memories didn’t frighten her – if that’s what he meant – but silently acknowledged to herself that the thought of what might have happened sometimes clutched hard and merciless at her chest and throat, leading her, if he was nearby, to reach out and touch him, or sometimes hug him tightly with no explanation.

She crossed into the kitchen to see what she had in the fridge for this evening. She was smug at her success in convincing him to stay vegetarian, although the only reason she kept making him the beetroot hummus was to see the poorly-disguised horror on his face when she brought it to his house. She strongly suspected he threw it in the trash as soon as she had left. He had, for his part, started to attempt little vegetarian dishes that he would serve for dinner, or bring over to hers, but their awfulness was wholly accidental – he was a dreadful cook – and she found she hadn’t the heart to do anything but stoically smile as she suffered through the meal.

Despite things going so well between them that they were apparently willing to gracefully tolerate each other’s culinary shortcomings, she had wondered, for a while, if he would perhaps want to keep their relationship under wraps, whether he thought that a tabloid journalist girlfriend would perhaps hinder him in his career climbing. She had told herself firmly that it wouldn’t hurt her, if this was the case, that if _anyone_ understood ambition, then she understood ambition – but that hadn’t alleviated the gnawing little ache in her chest at the thought of it.

However, it had turned out, after a chance encounter with Jack Crawford at a crime scene, that Frederick had mentioned meeting her for dinner. And lunch. And had wondered aloud with a gusty sigh and a sidelong glance what wine he should take to her place. And it turned out, in fact, that he had been mentioning her so much that it looked a little like boasting and really, this shouldn’t have surprised her – she knew Frederick liked to show off whenever possible, and was utterly artless when he did – but the fact that he was apparently proud of their relationship had caught her unawares, and made her chest ache pleasantly instead.

She wondered what they made of them as a couple. She was entirely aware of what they thought of her: obnoxious, pushy, self-serving, amoral – Freddie cared very little whether she was liked – and had learned what Will Graham thought of Frederick when she had stopped by his room in the hospital. She had thought she could at least stick her head in the room in passing and see whether Will might be amenable to contributing a couple of comments to her article – after all, faking her death was surely good for _some_ credit, wasn’t it? Will had noticed the magazines in her hand and, wrinkling his brow, asked if she had gone to all of this effort just to visit him. Rather unlikely, don’t you think? – she had responded tartly – adding that Frederick Chilton was here in an induced coma, and that she was hopeful that he would be keen to tell his side of the story as a victim of the FBI’s mishandling of the case. Well, Will had responded, a half smile on his face, Frederick was vain, and tacky, and prone to terrible judgment, and often ridiculous – he was sure he’d fit Freddie’s established house style perfectly.

Freddie frowned as she remembered the sudden flash of temper she’d felt at his assessment. She’d felt her own eyes turn piercing, and had watched Will’s smile falter as he realised that he’d offended her somehow. Being the infuriatingly talented Will Graham, he had almost instantly discerned that it was not his jibe at her website that had bothered her – those glanced off her armour, useless – but that she was inexplicably riled by his casual mockery of Frederick Chilton, even though she knew with a cool clarity that Will’s description was unerringly accurate. She’d turned on her heel to leave, when Will quietly saying her name had made her pause, tilting her head stiffly over her shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes. He could never have shot me, he’d said, which had prompted her to turn again to look at him, head tilted questioningly. Frederick, Will had clarified: he was desperate, terrified…. _hunted_ – but he still couldn’t pull the trigger. I told him he didn’t have it in him, but that wasn’t an insult. Staring back at Will’s flitting, erratic eyes, Freddie had realised suddenly that he genuinely meant it as a compliment, and that Frederick’s lack of killer instinct was, at the moment, perhaps the highest praise the broken man in the hospital bed could bestow.

When she had reached Frederick’s room and settled into the chair beside his bed, she had leant forward, elbows on knees and chin on gloved hands, regarding the sleeping man pensively and interrogating her own motivations for being there. Lying was a tool of her trade, but Freddie saw herself as a truth-teller at heart, and so when her self-interrogation uncovered the uncomfortable truth that Frederick Chilton, despite being vain and tacky and ridiculous – or perhaps because of those things – had managed to tug somehow on her notoriously untuggable heartstrings, she had forced herself to sit back in her chair and let this truth sink slowly in. She had wondered whether this might change when he woke up, and she was confronted with the reality of him, but the feeling had only asserted itself more strongly, forcing her to plan her own advance when she realised that Frederick – despite his painfully obvious interest in her - was likely to over-think himself into a panicked paralysis.

She put the containers from the fridge on the counter and headed back to the living room, pausing briefly at the mirror to primp her curls. She should have realised things were getting serious, she thought, smiling ruefully, when she had started to allow him to run his long fingers through her hair while they watched TV, wrecking her carefully coiffed curls. He was very tactile, she’d found – resting his chin on her shoulder while he read one of her articles over her shoulder, touching his hand to the small of her back as they worked in the kitchen - and she suspected that he had been starved of touch for a long while. Whereas she had resorted to casual encounters in the past when she had wanted sex, Frederick’s obvious glee in the growing domestic intimacy of their relationship made her think that impersonal encounters had never really been an option for him, that they would only have sharpened his deeper hunger.

His hunger for her was nakedly apparent. His hunger for her fed hers in turn, and she revelled in riling him up until his face was flushed and his pupils blown wide, and then indulging him when he broke and pounced on her, avaricious and ardent. Growing bold now that he felt confident in her desire for him, she had noticed that he had begun to take the initiative more of late, and she had found herself thrilled and breathless by the surprising strength and solidity of him when he had suddenly pushed her hard up against the bedroom wall, his hand sliding slow and deliberate up her skirt, green eyes narrowed and predatory.

Biting her lip at the thought of it, Freddie opened the bottle of wine she had set on the coffee table. He was a silly drunk, and rather a lightweight, she had discovered, with a tendency to be very affectionate – wrapping his arms round her like a limpet and burying his face in her neck, rumbling nonsense against her skin to make her wriggle. She pretended to arch her brow and imperiously tolerate this, while simultaneously plying him with wine to make sure he didn’t stop. On one particularly memorable occasion - stretched out together on his somewhat uncomfortable, showy sofa - he had waggled his eyebrows ridiculously at her and suggested truth or dare, and tried to trickle vodka from his glass into her mouth, explaining condescendingly all the while that vodka really was very chemically similar to sodium amytal. This had only resulted in vodka on the sofa and in Freddie’s hair, and Freddie herself laughing so hard she had felt lightheaded.

Hearing his knock at the door Freddie smiled, and rose to welcome him home.


End file.
